ASUS Cards

ASUS makes both NVIDIA and ATI based cards, and we have one of each here for the roundup.

ASUS GeForce FX 5950 Ultra

The ASUS 5950 is a heavy card with large heat sinks and two fans on the front. The design will fit in one slot, but we don't recommend filling the first PCI slot, as it's a tight fit and restricts airflow at the same time.

We could hit fairly good core speeds with this card, but we couldn't crank the memory up very high. All the 5950 Ultra cards that we looked at carry 2ns Hynix GDDR-II modules. So, this could mean that latencies were cranked down a bit on the board, but we don't have any confirmation on this.

ASUS Radeon 9600XT

We can see from the large rectangle on the back of this card that the ASUS Radeon 9600XT card is a VIVO (video in/video out) solution. Without going all the way into the all-in-wonder camp, this card is able to handle video input via the s-video port on the back.

This card didn't impress us in the overclocking camp, but VIVO is a very solid value-add that will appeal to many people. Rather than speed, stability is more important to this solution, and the card meets its mark at reference speeds.

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44 Comments

I'm surprised there weren't more DirectX9 games tested.I must admit its annoying when review sites test with only 1 or 2 older games and focus on just 3Dmark and new game tests, but considering all those cards are DX9 cards the lack of DX9 testing isn't right.Reply

You can d/l the coolbits reg edit which will add a tab to your display settings to overclock the video card with simple sliders. Just to compare with your FFXI my score was 3800 :)(I haven't run the benchmark with my card oc'd)

Can anyone tell me how to overclock the video cards??? I know that when you OC a cpu you gotta go to BIOS, but I just don't understand how Video Card overclocking works? I currently own a PNY FX5600 Ultra and a P4 3.06Ghz/533L2Cache - overclocked to 3.45Ghz and a 1Ghz of PC800 RDRAM. Scored 3437 on FFXI benchmark ver.2 . I really want to OC my video card so I can get better speed. And if you know how to OC then can you please e-mail me at hhsu@socal.rr.com? THANKS!Reply

Just out of curiosity, how did you guys overclock the video cards? I can't find anything in my drivers or bios to overclock my card. After reading your benchmarks, I purchased a evga 5900se. I upgraded from Gefoce2 Ultra

3dMark01 - Geforce 2 was 5013 and my Fx was 9109Is that a big jump? And in the FFXI benchmark I went from 1900 to 3800

Last nitpicks: box shots and bundle listings would have been useful, and part numbers and stock speeds should have been mandatory on each card's page. Considering most vendors offer multiple versions of each product, not clearly marking which card was tested in this overclocking roundup seems like a rather glaring omission. NewEgg now seems to offer a High Tek (HIS) 9600XT, but I can't tell if that's the same one as in your review, or even if stock memory speed for HIS cards is 600 or 650MHz. Your only mentions of memory speeds are at the ends of pages 15 and 16, somewhat removed from each card's product page. I think it would have much clearer and more helpful if you had mentioned that both Sapphire's and HIS' 9600XT's ship with their memory at 650MHz either in their product pages, or directly under the memory overclocking graph.Reply

Derek, Indig0's reply is slightly worying. I hope people aren't getting the wrong impression of anyone's performance based on a single sample's overclocked performance in only three benchmarks. If the samples were sent to you by each AIB, that's even more worrying, as who's to say they weren't cherry-picked?

In fact, not indicating both the clock speeds and the fact that the cards were overclocked on each benchmark graph seems like a gross oversight. If the Flash format is preventing you from doing so, then changing it should be a priority. But if you can add two lines of description for each card (which it looks like you have plenty of room for), I'd amend the review.

For future overclocking reviews, I think it'd be much more useful to at least show the percentage improvements in both clock speed and framerate in the game benchmark charts. Sure, you've covered this earlier in the article, but it's a long article, and there's no point in forcing people to continually flip back and forth when it's relatively simple to add this data to the graphs. Ideally, I'd have liked to see two graphs for each card, one for stock and one for OC'ed speed, with the clock speeds in the card title and the percent improvement over stock speed right after the OC'ed speed bar. I think you can cram a lot more useful data into those graphs. :)Reply

I would love to see benchmarks at 1600x1200. That's the sweetspot that I always play games at so I'd would like to see what kinda CPU/GPU combo it's gonna take to get smooth game play at that level. Reply